Join us on April 5th as Kinky Mink unleashes its first music video on an unsuspecting world!
Visit www.kinkymink.com or email kinkyminkband@gmail.com for tickets and information! Free but limited seating.
The party may be over, but the real party is just beginning!
I love the creative ways that writers sneak meaning into unexpected places. Many flash fiction writers decide that, when every word really does counts, even the title is an opportunity to convey meaning to a reader. Which is why I’m so glad that we have M’s piece, “A Three-Character Play Wherein One of the Characters Never Appears on Stage” on the agenda for today. (Story in its entirety below)
I have to admit that I love a well-crafted title, and I’ve used this technique often myself in stories such as “My Boyfriend Lives in the Tree In Front of My House,” and “Sometimes I Still Smell the Smoke in the Walls.” A fellow writer, Travis MacDonald, even takes guerrilla titling to an extreme in his piece:
Everyone Enjoyed the Buffet At The Chef’s Wife’s Wake Until That Awkward Moment When The Neighbor’s Dog Disturbed The Casket, Spilling Little Yellow IOUs All Over the Borrowed Carpet.
Flash fiction writers are discovering what journalists have known all along: headlines and lead sentences—the who-what-when-where-why served up front and without apology—are essential to communication between writer and reader. Titles I love include Ron Carlson’s “Bigfoot Stole My Wife”, Kona Morris’ “I’m Pretty Sure Nicholas Cage is My Gynecologist” and Rob Geisen’s “The Night I Discovered I Wasn’t as Cool As Han Solo”. Whether your title is somber or humorous, a well-crafted flash fiction title can convey meaning to the reader before the story has even begun. A nice trick when you only have 1000 words, no?
But is that cheating?
I suppose, technically, if the story is exactly 1000 words and the writer is only trying to squeeze in a few extra, it could be questionable. But more often than not, an effective flash fiction story falls well short of the 1000-word cutoff anyway, so it’s usually not so much about “getting in extra words” as it is about using the title differently. Borrowing from journalism—which, incidentally is another place where writing is confined by layouts and wordcounts—the flash fiction story squeezes meaning into every available space.
So M, let’s look at your story, “A Three-Character Play Wherein One of the Characters Never Appears on Stage”
Obviously I think your title is really working to not only convey additional information to the reader but also to provide a potent “hook” into your story. I also like the natural leanness of your language—I can tell you come to flash fiction from poetry, and often poets have an easier grasp on this than writers coming from other genres. And lastly you have some really striking images—I particularly like the building as a delinquent dental patient and the pear in yogurt as volcanic islands. I feel as if this story is already well on its way to being an effective piece of flash, keeping tension strung and covering a great deal of distance in a short amount of time.
What still needs work are some technical issues of clarity most often brought about by your use of multiple pronouns. While I’m also a fan of nameless characters, I find it works best when you limit anonymous characters to one male and one female. As soon as pronouns are used for more than two characters, or if two or more characters are using the same gender pronoun, it can quickly become confusing.
Right away in this piece I’m not sure whether “her cigarettes never go out” and “she never leaves the window” refer to the neighbor or the speaker—it could be either. When you finally say “he lives across the street” I’m surprised that the neighbor is male. Then I’m trying keep track of the “he” of the neighbor vs. the husband, and the “she” as our speaker vs. the dead woman, who may or may not be the same woman? Now I realize a bit of mystery, especially in the Hitchcock legacy, can be wonderful, but too much might be getting in the way of your story.
There are many ways you might be able to fix this. One suggestion is rather than using straight pronouns, you can use different “names” such as “The Husband”, “The Neighbor”, etc. Or you can refer to characters as “the one that smokes” or “the one with the lamp”.
Lastly, by the end I’m still unsure if he killed a third woman “she” or the speaker. (If this is what you are going for, then great, but if you wanted more clarity by the end you may still have to tweak). And then when he addresses himself by name, Jeff Jeffries, after a story full of anonymities, it feels just a touch too “ta-da!” and possibly contrived? Not sure if you need it…
M, I think once you can clear up these confusions for the reader, the story will have the effect you want it to. I hope this helps you on your revisions, and thanks so much for trusting me with your work and letting us all learn from your process!
Happy Writing!
~Nancy Stohlman
Please feel free to join in the conversation! And if you would like me to feature your flash piece in progress, please find me on Facebook or email me at nancystohlman@gmail.com.
*
A Three-Character Play Wherein One of the Characters Never Appears on Stage
by M
She has a neighbor. Her neighbor has a lamp. The lamp has a green glass shade. The lamp never goes out. Her cigarettes never go out. She almost never leaves the kitchen window. It’s the only place she smokes now. He lives in the building across the street. She’s watched the window for weeks. She’s never even seen him.
Eight in the morning, the lamp is on. Three in the afternoon, lamp’s on. Midnight. Lamp. On. It’s pre-dawn. The building looks like the mouth of a delinquent dental patient, every tooth knocked out by neglect except for one green straggler suspended by a rubber band of gum tissue.
She’s on the second floor. She has binoculars. She’s too low to see anything but the lamp. “You look like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window,” her husband says. He’s scratching his balls and doesn’t remotely resemble Grace Kelly. He’s obsessed with bottle blondes in classic films. He’s carrying a glue bottle. He thinks she spends too much time in the kitchen since her mother died. She thinks he spends too much time out of it. She wants to ask why glue doesn’t stick to the inside of the bottle. She wants him to sing I got glue, babe. “If this is your idea of quitting, it’s not working,” he says.
She’s waiting for the day, the hour, the lamp goes out. She’ll call the cops. “This doesn’t require police intervention.” She says something out of the ordinary: A slight evasion in the infinite cosmos of arrested light. Gregory Building. Fifth floor. South-facing corner apartment.
It’s a slow night. They find the corpse in the bathroom. Female. Blonde. Early thirties. Fatal blow to the back of the head. Blood coating the rim of the tub. Every front tooth knocked out.
“Jesus, chill out, Jeff Jeffries,” he says. He’s slicing a pear into a bowl of vanilla yogurt. The slices are volcanic islands. The yogurt is a tranquil lagoon. His knife is caught by the glare of a grow lamp she turns on every morning, turns off every evening for the orchid she knows she’ll kill. It needs light and dark in equal doses. Eventually she’ll forget this.
M is a performance poet who occasionally dabbles in other genres. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, and received a number of awards, including finalist position for two consecutive years in the annual Rattle $5000 Poetry Prize. Her poetry chapbook, To That Mythic Country Called Closure, winner of the 2012 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Prize, will be released in the fall of 2013. You can listen to her perform selections of her work at the Rattle Audio Archives:http://www.rattle.com/poetry/audio/. She also does her own manicures weekly, and has been known to wear foundation, mascara, and lipstick while undergoing major surgery.
Most of us remember the book that made us want to become writers. For me it was The Mirror, a time-traveling novel set in the mining camps of Colorado long before I ever dreamed of living here. I was 10 years old. That same year, sitting on the bleachers at a soccer game, I told my mother I was going to be an author.
Since those days I’ve dedicated my life to the creation of art. I’ve strolled, stumbled, skipped, and often dragged myself down the path that any writer understands: the manuscripts abandoned in drawers, the shame of rejection, the yearned-for approval of publication, lonely hours spent wrestling with creation, the exquisite moment of birth. And I’ve spent a good deal of that time looking for colleagues with the same dedication, long-term vision, and commitment to an artistic life.
But, despite having been touched by many beautiful wordsmiths, my circle of colleagues continues to shrink. Reality picks them off slowly. The first ones fall to fantasy—those who are talented but undisciplined, or committed but only to a caricature. The ones who believe each word they write is precious, or who retreat after one rejection.
After fantasy it becomes more personal. The next fall to circumstance: your graduate school colleagues, your heartbroken writing partner who could no longer face the page, the writer who was forced into parenthood or personal tragedy, the brilliant writer who lost herself in a bottle of whatever was on sale. The disciplined writer who wrote ten manuscripts but never found her voice. The writer left autopsying her only manuscript until it was something unrecognizable.
And finally, the last fall to hubris. Having counted themselves among the few still standing, they think they’ve already won. Hubris arrives slyly and tempts us to no longer struggle. Because for god’s sake we’ve struggled enough. They should be knocking on our door, after all. And they, quietly, fall.
I write from this wreckage because I’m looking for survivors.
Last summer, while cleaning out my bookshelves, I came across my old copy of The Mirror. I reminisced over the author’s black and white headshot, her long straight black hair, and reread the bio I’d read 100 times as a child. Wait a minute—Boulder?
After much sleuthing I found her, hermitted away in a grand house in the hills of Boulder immaculately gardened by people with time to garden. She shyly opened the door, and I recognized the aged version of the woman on that book jacket. I followed her down the long hallway of a dozen or so framed best-selling books and into a sunny living room with a waiting tray of sweet lemonade. I’d already been warned by her husband about the Alzheimers, that she hadn’t written for many years and didn’t feel she had much to contribute to an official interview. After a while I finally got brave enough to ask:
Do you miss writing?
She answered without hesitation: No.
It got to the point where it wasn’t fun anymore, she clarified. They always wanted me to write the same book, they didn’t want anything new. They’d want to see the first three chapters before I even knew what the story was about, and then they’d try to give me edits and tell me where the story should go until it wasn’t my story anymore. It got to the point where I couldn’t do it.
She gazed into her lemonade.
But I made a lot of money, she added. Back in those days a writer could make a lot of money…and I do mean a lot. Especially once you sell the translation rights.
Dust swirled in the silence. Your book is the one that made me want to be a writer, I finally told her. And I shared my world: the bodies tasting of defeat and bitterness, the bone yard of forgotten words, the preciousness of the survivors, writing unafraid into the pink crayon mornings.
And then I held out my 30-year old book and, in very shaky penmanship, she signed it.
Welcome back, and thanks to Diane Klammer for providing her work in progress, “The Portuguese Lesson”, for discussion. I’ve edited Diane’s work previously in Fast Forward anthologies, so I was excited to see what she is currently working on, and her story in its entirety, as well as her bio and links, are below.
“The Portuguese Lesson” is a great reason to discuss one of the most interesting aspects of flash fiction: how the constraints of the genre force the writer to convey meaning in new and creative ways. Which means that the flash fiction genre is not only cultivating a new kind of writer but also a new kind of reader because, in order to convey meaning in such a short space, the reader must become implicated in the process. No longer is the reader able to passively absorb information but they now must actively jump gaps and fill in blanks.
A writer I admire a lot, Selah Saterstrom, talks about the “synapses” between ideas. In such a short space, the core of our ideas often sit stripped to their essence, without all the connective tissue that we are afforded in a longer work. Imagine nerve cells that don’t quite touch but still communicate because the impulses are jumping the gaps. In the same way, the flash fiction writer often has to throw an idea to the reader—and trust that they have properly posited their reader to catch it. Ultimately flash fiction is cultivating a new symbiosis between writer and reader, readers who are actively participating and writers who must trust their readers to complete their thoughts—on and off the page.
This happens on both a micro and a macro level. On the macro level we ask the reader to orient themselves without backstory, for example, or leave a story without a neat “bow” of resolution. On a micro level it often happens inside the sentence itself. Line editing a flash piece requires we ask the question: what is essential? Not what is beautiful, or what is clever, or what is poignant, but what is absolutely essential? There’s a delicacy to the flash fiction editing process akin to trimming a bonsai tree: Does the reader absolutely need this word or will they be able to jump the synapse without it? How about this whole branch of description—will the reader be able to follow me without it?
This does not mean that all flash fiction has to be minimalist, but this kind of editing, not for meaning or beauty or language but for essentiality is one of the most important skills that the flash fiction writer must hone.
So Diane, let’s look at your piece in progress, “The Portuguese Lesson”, with some of these things in mind.
What works really well in your piece is that you’re familiar with the flash fiction form on the macro level—you jump right into the action without bogging us down with backstory or a lot of tangents. Writers new to flash fiction often feel they need to set up a story, but you do a great job of entering the scene en media res (in the middle of the action) and ending the story at the soonest possible moment of resolution.
What still needs work in this story is trimming the excess at the micro level—while your piece falls well into flash guidelines at 778 words, its still feels bloated with nonessential words. Shrinking it will allow what is left to really pop and the story to take on a leanness that is doesn’t quite have yet.
So let’s see it in action: I grabbed the first section from your piece, which is originally 180 words. I’ve put your version here, and then a second trimmed version below:
180 words
“I want you to promise me that you won’t let me get lost,” She said, glancing at her daughter beside her.
“Mom, when are you going to grow up?’
“You know I get lost coming out of a paper bag, and tonight you have me driving, when I can’t see two feet in front of me.” Mary’s mother was adamant and hurt.
“Mom, you name is Hope. We are going all of eight miles. I think you can make it.”
“This Highlander is too big. I knew this Highlander was too big for me and it’s zero degrees outside.
What if we stall and freeze to death? The streets are so dark, no one will find us for days. No one in their right mind is outside tonight.”
“What did you tell me that kind of thinking is called. Awfulizing? You’re awfulizing.”
“I do that when I get anxious. I’d better keep my mind of my driving. Why did we sign up for the Portuguese class anyway?’
“Because you wanted to do this all your life. This is Jupiter Avenue. Make a left here.”
120 words
“I want you to promise me that you won’t let me get lost,” she said, glancing at her daughter. “I can’t see two feet in front of me.”
“Mom, we’re going eight miles an hour. I think we’ll make it.”
“This Highlander is too big. I knew this Highlander was too big for me and it’s zero degrees outside. What if we stall and freeze to death? No one will find us for days.”
“What did you tell me that kind of thinking is called? Awfulizing? You’re awfulizing.”
“I’d better focus on driving. Why did we sign up for a Portuguese class anyway?’
“Because you wanted to do this your whole life. This is Jupiter Avenue. Make a left here.”
*
So Diane, with simple testing for essentiality I was able to reduce this section by 1/3 without losing any meaning (except her name, which comes up later).
So here’s your homework: test every word for absolute essentiality to the story. And what I suspect is that you will end up eliminating wordy phrases or extra descriptions or information that is already given in another part of the story—stuff you won’t even miss.
And now we return to the reader: without the extra words, the extra backstory, the extra description, the well-positioned flash fiction reader sits waiting in the synapse, jumping the gaps, catching your meanings thrown and co-creating the story with you in a beautiful act of symbiosis.
Thanks so much, Diane, for letting me play with your story! And I welcome comments and continued conversations–we are all writers in progress!
Happy Writing!
Nancy Stohlman
Next up: M! (contact me on Facebook or at nancystohlman@gmail.com if you would like me to consider your flash story in progress for future columns.)
The Portuguese Lesson
By Diane Klammer
(787 words)
“I want you to promise me that you won’t let me get lost,” she said, glancing at her daughter beside her.
“Mom, when are you going to grow up?’
“You know I get lost coming out of a paper bag, and tonight you have me driving, when I can’t see two feet in front of me.” Mary’s mother was adamant and hurt.
“Mom, your name is Hope. We are going all of eight miles. I think you can make it.”
“This Highlander is too big. I knew this Highlander was too big for me and it’s zero degrees outside.
What if we stall and freeze to death? The streets are so dark, no one will find us for days. No one in their right mind is outside tonight.”
“What did you tell me that kind of thinking is called. Awfulizing? You’re awfulizing.”
“I do that when I get anxious. I’d better keep my mind of my driving. Why did we sign up for the Portuguese class anyway?’
“Because you wanted to do this all your life. This is Jupiter Avenue. Make a left here.”
Somehow they weaved through the dark with frost on the window. Hope knew she was starting to get cataracts, but the insurance company wouldn’t remove them until they were really advanced. She also had vitreous detachment and recovered retinal detachment. A whole list of things made her hate driving, but her daughter insisted she give it a try.
“This place is on the end of a cul de sac, but the street number is not visible,” Hope said. The number is 1800. Maybe we can figure it out by process of elimination if we see the other numbers. What is that one?”
“That one is not marked either. Mom, don’t freak out, but none of them are numbered and they all look the same.”
The houses were all one story brick buildings with brown shingles and there were no street numbers. No cars were parked out front. There was one large oak tree in front of each one, planted in the middle of each front yard. A small, snow covered lawn led up to a small porch. It looked somewhat otherworldly to see so much identically in houses.
“We’re going to have to get out and walk,” Hope said.
“That’s going to be a picnic in this weather. OK, let’s go.” Mary did not particularly want to come tonight, but she wanted to help. They walked up to the first door and knocked. It was two houses from the one in the middle. No one answered, but they heard conversation behind the door, so they called out. A Japanese man came to the door. “Hello, are you here for the Japanese lesson?’ That question really floored both of them. “No. As it turns out, coincidentally we’re looking for a Portuguese lesson.
“Portuguese? No Portuguese taught here. Only Japanese.” Mary tried to ask if he knew of the location of the house that taught Portuguese, but the man was already walking away and shutting the door. “あなたの手助けをありがとうございますThat was weird,” she said. They went to knock at the next house, both a bit spooked. An entire family of German speakers answered. The mother said,. “Willkommen zu unseren Home. Möchten Sie sie begann Deutsch lernen? “
One of the kids added, “Ma, schauen Sie auf die lustige Kleidung, die sie tragen.”
Hope muttered “Leider können wir nicht sprechen deutsch.”
The two of them backed out of there as the words were falling from Hope’s mouth, uncomprehended. “Where the hell are we?” Mary blurted out. Hope just shook her head.
At that moment, the door to the house at the very center of the cul de sac opened.. Brazilian music played from inside.
“Boa noite. É preciso ter Esperança e de Maria. Vamos ter que se esperava,” A very good looking man of around forty five said. He had dark hair and coffee colored skin and the biggest brown eyes Hope ever saw…
“Boa noite. We’re here for the Portuguese lesson, and it seems like the whole block is teaching tonight.”
“Pardon me. I don’t know my neighbors very well yet. I just moved in. Actually, I’m renting from a friend. We’re ending a music lesson and you two are welcome to listen until it’s over. Please, come in. You must be freezing.
“The two of them looked at each other. “Are you up to this?” Hope asked her daughter.
“I am if you are mom.”
“You broke your promise, you know.” Hope smiled at Mary
Mary gave her mom’s hand a small squeeze, and they went inside.
Diane Klammer feels she has lived several lives as a Biology Teacher, Counseling Psychologist for several populations, musician, wife and mother and writer, not necessarily in that order. Her Poetry and stories are in many print and online journals, magazines and anthologies such as Rattle, Lummox and Fast Forward Press. She published one book of poetry with Monkey Puzzle Press in 2009 titled Shooting the Moon. She now serves BCPOS as a Naturalist, sings for seniors, works with Mental Health Partners as Counselor, is a Registered Psychotherapist in Colorado and tutors privately. She tries to read or write two hours a day. She has contemplated throwing out her TV, but hasn’t succeeded yet.
Read more about Diane Klammer and her work here:
